~ 12 steps for better living.

Category Archives: Relapse

When I was a kid growing up, my mother (and my grandmother) used to constantly berate me for being like a bull in a china shop. It was one of the first humiliations I wrote about in my inventory many years ago…the feeling of not ‘fitting’ in my world, in my body, on the planet. I don’t know why I woke up this morning thinking about that. Have you ever felt like you were walking through someone else’s delicate life on your tippy toes…just trying not to screw something up? Or like you were an enormous sack of a human being wobbling here and there on a tightrope scooping up piles of yourself so as not to crush the world below you in which everyone seems to know their place? Did you feel put in a corner? Or maybe you just crawled there through the cliché of choice.

The thing that strikes me about being an addict is that gradually, little by little, we become the voiceless fringe on the edge of society, and whether we shout from the rooftops that we want to be there, or we grumble and complain about how misunderstood we are and how no one could possibly feel what we feel, the end result is the same. We become powerfully silenced by the disease. Step 5 is (to me) about starting to reverse that silence.

There’s no shame in our game. If I’ve learned anything in my sober days, it’s that we’re a pure force of nature. I just watched JM live his normal life (which is by definition insane) then leave and go manage sets at the SuperBowl for 13 days, fly in at 6 p.m. on a Monday night and roll out of bed Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. for an exam in his first class…score a B on that exam, go to class all day, come home, eat a little, sleep a little, and roll out of bed at 5 this morning to go train a bootcamp on Lake Travis. Pure force.

We start to wake up in sobriety, in all kinds of ways. When this awakening coincides with our dreams and ambitions, it’s an amazing thing to watch. When it coincides with our innermost fears and our darkness, it’s a terrifying thing to experience. My childhood didn’t make me an alcoholic, but it probably didn’t help things any. In Step 5 (the first time and many times since) I learned to begin to say out loud the things that humiliated me, frustrated me, made me feel powerless and put in a corner.

Maybe a bull in a china shop is just a child with a soft soulful ballooning spirit too big for her body. A woman in the program told me that. In Step 5 she helped me begin to tell a different story. I slowly edged my way off the tightrope. It’s a l o n g process. Sometimes we just wake up there…not really sure what happened, or how to get down. We wobble here and there to find our footing in a groundless world. We may be so desperate that we call out for god, or whatever our understanding of god is. Sometimes god is skin (yours and mine). Telling someone is a part of acknowledging that we are not alone. Unity is our first tradition. It is the common burden of our disease that makes it possible; the power to share our recovery that makes it meaningful.

Not dying was the highlight of my drinking and using, so I say that’s a win…right? Sometimes I’m so sarcastic that even I can’t tell when I’m being serious, and that’s kind of my mood today.

I don’t want to spend too much time recounting some of the more dangerous and deadly ideas that were shared at the newcomer meeting I went to last night, but here’s a brief recap: (and please note, there was a wet drunk in the room!) Also, in the event that anyone finds this offensive due to the “what we see here stays here, here here…” just know that I have disguised things to protect the innocent (and the guilty!) So, to the drunk we (as a group) said:

THE OPTIMIST

“This thing is deadly …uhhh…I don’t know. If you’re one of us, you’re just fucked (umm..ok, I’m reserving judgement at this point…are we talking tough love? It could go either way, BUT THEN . ..) Sometimes I think the ones who died when they were drinking and using were the lucky ones. But we’re here for you…yeah.”

THE REALIST

“You’re not unique. Every one of us has been exactly where you are (Great so far! But then a sharp left off the deep end...) I sat in exactly that chair 4 months ago and look at me now. Last week I was here sobbing. But I didn’t want to drink…I wanted to die, end it all, kill myself. (There’s something to look forward to, huh?)

Let’s call him SUNSHINE

Listen, no matter what, you’re going to feel better and better and better (mmm, ok, hard to predict where he’s going with this) If you stop drinking (you being the 40-year-old with sclerosis of the liver and a distended abdomen who is having bowel problems) just 24 hours and you’re going to feel better, so much better! And you’re just going to keep feeling better and better and better (he repeated this point a lot) That’s what happened for me!

Ahhh…sober drunks. You gotta love us for our eternal ability to take any person’s pain and make it all about us.

The truth is, if you’ve been around here for a while and you think the lucky ones were the ones who died using, you’re not getting it.

If after a length of sobriety you’re still trying to end it, you may want to seek some outside help.

And if you think that things get automatically better for every person who stops picking up…well, you’ve never been me. When I stopped drinking and using, things got worse…a lot worse, for a short while. Take my witty and charming personality and remove substances (back then) and you’ve got raw unleashed rage. Yuck!

That’s why Step 2 doesn’t say that the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous can restore us to sanity. It says we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity (note that it also does not say we are restored to sanity at this point…only that we come to believe in the possibility.) It’s why it is so very important to think about the message we are carrying to the newcomer. It’s why I’m writing this blog…to remind you that this blog will not restore you to sanity…but the steps, now the steps are where the power is.

We work the steps for one reason and one reason only: TO FIND A WAY TO A GOD OF OUR UNDERSTANDING, or whatever your version of that is. The process of the steps begins to clear away the trash that is cutting us off from the sunlight of the spirit. It cleans the closet, yeah, and that’s good stuff. Because you may have some really bad moments in sobriety (we call that life on life’s terms) and you don’t get to drink over them. You may take some vivid and wild rides and things may get so good that you suddenly wonder if you were ever even an alcoholic to begin with–but you still don’t get to drink. There are a lot of reasons to drink, but if you have any reservation that drinking can still be your solution, you’re dead–and I mean that literally.

We don’t drink or use no matter what. I can’t emphasize that point enough. And when you don’t drink/use no matter what for enough days in a row, what you discover is that you live through it (whatever it is…your feelings, someone’s death, losing your job) and it doesn’t kill you. It’s called acceptance people, or WELCOME TO REALITY, and it’s the price we pay around here for the high cost of survival and the extraordinary opportunity to be rocketed into the 4th dimension.

The best advice you can give the new kid is to remind him (or her) that everyone was new once. And you know what I didn’t know when I was new? I didn’t know that what I felt about 27 1/2 minutes after I committed to quitting drinking and staying sober was called a craving.

Hot sweats. Finger tapping. Leg shaking. Eyes tracking my surroundings. Yeah. Craving. Even the remote possibility that I might never drink or use again used to have my ears ringing, heart racing, blood rushing up from my chest to the top of my head and pumping back down into my gut. The whole time my head would be screaming at me between the ears, “Hey you piece of garbage, you’re not done. There’s no way you’re gonna stay sober. You’re a joke.”

Yeah, that’s called craving. And it’s one of the primary things that separates an addict from a potential alcoholic. “We believe… that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class (alcoholics) and never occurs in the average temperate drinker.” That’s straight out of the doctor’s opinion.

It’s lousy news. Others can drink and use with impunity. They can nurse their private pains, heartaches and hurts with a bottle of Jack Daniels and still function the next day. They don’t get in cars, cross state lines, get arrested. They can sit around a table in a bar with their friends and clink martini glasses and then show up for their life a few hours later. I know…mystifying. Time and time again as alcoholics and addicts, we’ll say we’re going to stop. We see the pain on the face of the people who love us and we feel certain inside that this is finally it. But it isn’t. In spite of the most adamant resolution not to drink, in the face of total chaos and destruction, the moment comes when we drink again.

Unless.

Unless we can experience a complete psychic change. (That means a complete displacement of the attitudes and responses that used to guide our entire lives.)

Oh. Okay. Total psychic transformation. Well why didn’t you just say that. Let me get my magic carpet and zoom right over.

So here’s the advice:

Everything is going to have to change. That means you can’t hold onto stuff like your good ideas and all the reasons you can’t do the things we’re asking you to do.

You need to kick the old crowd to the curb. It’s impossible to stay sober when you’re spending the majority of time with people who drink and use like you do. I know this because I lived the first 6 months of my sober life in a house full of addicts and alcoholics. Very unpleasant. You are not welcome when you are sober because you become a mirror in which others see their disease.

It’s one day at a time…forever. So don’t use or drink no matter what. Learn to recoil from the drink (drug) as if it was going to reach out, grab your throat and choke you to death. Because the disease wants you dead. Period.

After a while, it will be unnecessary to recoil from the drink (or drug.) We are oddly placed in some position of neutrality when it comes to alcohol (I cannot really speak for drugs since I have not put myself around any drugs in my sobriety.) The great fact for us is not just that we will not have to drink…but that we will not want to drink. That’s amazing stuff. Science can’t explain that. Religion can’t explain it. Your shrink can’t explain it. It’s a god thing.

Don’t get too hung up on God. If you’re down with God, amen. Keep doing what you’re doing and get to know your god a little better. If you can’t stand god…no big deal. Think of God as Group of Drunks. I love that! It kept me here. I hated god. I hated church. I hated religion. I wouldn’t say the Lord’s prayer because I was born Jewish. The story goes on ad infinitum but it’s all B.S., so I’ll leave it at this. If you stick around you will make your peace with god. Or you won’t. And either way it will be fine. A speaker I was listening to the other day said, “You only need to know 2 things about God: God is. And you aren’t God.

Go to as many meetings as you can. I easily clocked close to a 1,000 meetings in my first year. Why? Well, I was very very sick. And also, very bored and boring, and really had nothing going on that would prevent me from making 3 meetings a day. It was the first place I had been invited to return to in a long time. And there was always coffee. Sometimes there was cake. And I love cake. After a few months I started to know people…like really know them. People share all kinds of crazy stuff from the podium. I started to wake up, defrost. People would catch me in a meeting and they’d say something nutty like, “oh, it’s happening in you.” I had no idea what the eff that meant. I didn’t know that they meant they meant that when I came through the doors I looked like death warmed over and that I was starting to come back to life a little.

I’ve now seen that happen to newcomers. Sometimes I smile and tell them, “hey, it’s happening for you.”

Keep coming back to Alcoholics Anonymous. Always come back. Because you earned your seat. It is doubtful that you ended up here by mistake. And we love you. We really do. It’s kind of weird…I know. I’m not a particularly touchy feely person, but I have learned in AA how to open my heart to you and to my fellows. We have a common problem and a common solution, and that unites us. It’s an amazing thing to be a part of.